The article argues that Haiti's diplomatic isolation after its revolut
ion and independence was due to two different processes, its place in
the symbolic system of domestic politics in the United States, and its
place in the lives and experience of people intensely concerned with
Haiti in France, Britain, and Spain. The result was that the diplomati
c isolation was ended first in the 1830s by Europe, by the countries m
aterially damaged by the Hatian Revolution. It was ended later by the
United States and its Spanish-American client states, who were only sy
mbolically damaged by Haiti as an antislavery black power symbol, afte
r the Emancipation Proclamation in the 1860s. A theory of the politics
of diplomacy with two parts, the role of a foreign country as a symbo
l in the domestic politics of other countries, and the role of people
with extensive contact and interest in particular parts of another cou
ntry in the diplomatic milieux of other countries, is developed to exp
lain this case.